Oculus Rift Preorders Announced, Still No Word On Price Or Release Date

Pre-orders for the Oculus Rift VR headset begin January 6, according to the Facebook-backed company. Photo: Oculus

Oculus Rift announced on Monday that it's accepting preorders beginning Wednesday. The actual price and release date of the Facebook-backed virtual reality headset has not been announced. All preorders will include "EVE: Valkyrie" for free with the platformer "Lucky's Tale" included in all Oculus Rift purchases.

VR is expected to be a main topic of conversation at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2016) taking place this week in Las Vegas. HTC, Samsung and Sony may have announcements regarding their VR futures -- with new details regarding the latter's PlayStation VR being highly anticipated. Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR both have first quarter 2016 releases, but no dates or prices have been announced.

Each Oculus Rift preorder will include "EVE: Valkyrie" for free. Oculus previously announced it will bundle the VR platformer "Lucky's Tale" with each headset. Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder, will discuss all things VR as part of a Reddit AMA Wednesday at 6 p.m. PST (9 p.m. EST). As part of its preorder announcement, Oculus stated it will "be sharing everything you need to know to order your Rift," indicating a date and price may be finally revealed on — or just before — Wednesday.

If you're one of those people with a VR headset on your"must have" list, you should know there are some potential hurdles to going virtual. Oculus announced in May 2015 the minimum requirements necessary to handle VR. "The recommended PC specification is an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM," Oculus stated. Rendering a standard 1080p game at 60HZ requires 124 million shaded pixels per second, according to Oculus. The Rift requires more pixels per second on two different displays -- one for each eye -- estimated to be around 400 million pixels per second.

Ahead of CES 2016, Nvidia announced a "VR Ready" program for PCs to optimize the experience for gamers. Partners include Acer, Alienware, Asus and Hewlett-Packard. Retailers and laptops will have "GeForce GTX VR Ready" badges attached to PCs and laptops.